


Excuses

by woollen_pharaohs



Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Vietnam War, hard start soft ending, the inherent violence of assumed heterosexuality, the inherent violence of the nuclear family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-14 22:09:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21023021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/woollen_pharaohs/pseuds/woollen_pharaohs
Summary: There was the freedom that Bill found in Vietnam, as strange as that sounded, and then there was the freedom that he found in Holden, is strange asthatsounded.





	Excuses

**Author's Note:**

> I told myself I wasn't going to write any more fanfiction until I have finished my 5000 word report but look, one of these projects actually has a word count above 0 so what am i gonna do? _not_ post a completed fanfic? sounds unlikely.

Bill and Nancy knew each other since they were kids. She was always invited to Tench family events, and he to hers. It was understood by both families that Bill would marry Nancy, and that was fine by them. It made sense. That didn’t mean it had to happen right away. They took each other to prom, finished high school, Nancy went to nursing school and Bill, he always knew he wanted to go into law enforcement. Serving in the Vietnam War was just one of the necessary steps. 

He knew he left Nancy waiting for him. Worrying that he would even come back. Part of him hoped he wouldn’t, then he wouldn’t have to face what his life ought to look like. The military was something else. Not to say that he liked it, no one liked it. And the war wasn’t going to last forever, so they hoped. But the military offered him a first taste of a drug he still hasn’t learned how to rehabilitate from. He was serving his country, protecting people, helping people. Or thoughts like those got him through every day. But he had to hold onto it. And the very idea wasn’t just to make himself feel better, it gave him a reason to be away from Nancy and the life that was waiting for him back home. The excuse was his justification for why he didn’t _want_ to go back home.

He loved Nancy. Deeply loved her. But when Speck was out there killing nurses while Nancy was at nurse school in ‘66, he subjected himself to the rough, broken sounds of rubble beneath his feet. A bombed shelter. Concrete dust caked his nostrils. And he thought about life without her. Imagined what his life would be like if he never met her. If he hadn’t left a woman waiting for him before going to the other side of the world.

He lived in this dream for the day, as the sky became swamped with all the hues of brown and the clouds drifted down in thick tendrils, blasting a violent storm over the hot splintered concrete. He knew there were other men like him. Men who left their girlfriends or wives behind. And many other men who had no one. How twisted they might have thought he was, if he admitted he wanted to take their place. He wanted to be the man with no wife, no girlfriend. But he still wanted love. He still wanted to be loved. Nancy loved him, and Bill loved her, but not in the way he saw love in the military. He hadn’t seen anything like it anywhere else; the way men loved each other. But he couldn’t have that because he had Nancy, and Nancy was waiting for him, and he was still alive by the end of his service. 

He went back home, like he was supposed to. Married her, like he was supposed to. And got a job, like he was supposed to. So then it wasn’t the military, it was work, that became his excuse not to see her. He knew Nancy wanted things from him. Knew she wanted a family. That her version of a family meant he was around more. The she could see him more. That he would love her the way she loved him, and want her the way she wanted him. He knew she was sad. He was sad too. Nothing that was supposed to happen felt the way it was supposed to. 

He liked his work at the FBI, brutal as it was. Nancy didn’t like it one bit and so he protected he from it. Didn’t talk about it. Kept it separate. And so there was more work than there was Nancy. He didn’t know how to bridge that, or didn’t want to, didn’t want to try. He just couldn’t. There were things that Nancy would ask him to do, and things he wanted to ask Nancy to do, but couldn’t. Couldn’t ask her to stop loving him, so he showed her how. Showing was better than telling. 

And then he met Special Agent Holden Ford. Regarded him in that sunlit cafeteria is if he were in the presence of an angel. It wasn’t so much Holden’s infallible innocence that attracted him to the man as it was that Holden shocked him. The kinds of things that Holden would suggest, would do, would say. The things that would come out of his mouth, and that he would take in. Late nights in their hotel room. Holden’s arms around his waist to steady himself as he took Bill’s cock in his mouth. 

There was the freedom that he found in Vietnam, as strange as that sounded, where it was just him and the other soldiers and the job they had to do. The hard weather and the shrapnel scattering over the ravaged landscape, and how he had thought that was helping to clear his head. How he had thought that being away from home, being alone, being stuck in an inescapable position would heal him. How, as the time in the war passed, his singular pleasure in getting to embrace men in his arms longer than he should have became harder and harder. He became numb to it. Didn’t even feel the want to kiss them where he ought not to. He knew that he was just going through the motions, as he was meant to. And he recalled that he even felt he missed Nancy. Her company, at least. He knew that during the war, he missed her friendship. He still did, even when it was all over between them. 

Before Holden, he thought that numbness, that capacity to just go through the motions, was freedom. Or at least that he was free of thoughts that he wasn’t supposed to have. But the expanse of war in a whole country filtered down to one plot of land. His house, his home. His wife and son on the frontlines of the quiet war that splintered between them, and he was retreating. Walking away and into Holden’s arms, free to hold and embrace and kiss a man who’s more forthcoming than his Christian upbringing would suggest, and more comfortable in freedom’s endless sea than Bill ever thought possible. With Holden, he could breathe. He could love. He could _be_. And he found himself, for the first time in his life, looking forward to coming home. 

**Author's Note:**

> basically i wanted to explore the longstanding history and tension between bill and nancy and rationalise how he would allow himself to be with holden in a romantic fashion... anyway, hope you liked it ^_^


End file.
